A pair of remarkable projects created by Ben Fry and Fathom may seem like simple marketing. But one day soon could enterprise software look like this?

GE has been riding the infographics train for all its worth, creating a slew of remarkable charts illustrating everything from health ailments and how their linked to how good different countries are at innovating. But they’ve rarely turned the lens onto the company’s own data, which makes these two experiments, by Ben Fry’s company Fathom, so interesting. Both look deep into the welter of data that GE’s products create everyday, and in so doing, offer a little glimpse into what could be possible when infographics make their way from Internet fad to management tool.

The second shows data from 123,000 medical scans, performed on the company’s CT and MRI machines:

The charts are eye-popping, but the real star here is the data. The fact that it’s even being gathered–and the possibility that soon, it could be gathered in real time–augurs changes in the way that businesses might be run. From GE’s perspective, you can easily imagine charts like these being used to figure out whether a turbine or an MRI machine is about to break down. And if you can preempt an expensive repair, then you could potentially reduce downtime and net billions in efficiency gains. (This scenario isn’t fantasy–in fact, one GE employee recently told me that they’re working on that very idea.) In the meantime, you have companies such as Roambi, a startup backed by millions from Sequoia, which specializes in creating interactive charts that interface with a company’s databases, allowing, say, a sales manager to zoom around the performance figures of each of his sales reps.

The point is, as the data we produce continues to grow–a trend many people call Big Data–there will be more and more value gained by simply making sense of data that already exists. Reams of raw figures like the ones hinted at above don’t help if they’re too big to be captured by human intuition. And that, ultimately, is the great hope of infographics: To help us add intelligence and insight to the digital noise buzzing around us every day.

Top image: A GE turbine factory in Greenville, South Carolina.

About the author

Cliff is director of product innovation at Fast Company, founding editor of Co.Design, and former design editor at both Fast Company and Wired.